Full Cold Moon

By Lissa Marie Redmond

'Fans of police procedurals will want to read all in the series after this compelling, twisted story' - Library Journal Starred Review

A murder of an Icelandic man during a Full Cold Moon reminds Lauren Riley of a previous case she failed to solve. She is determined not to let it happen again.

Since her partner on the Cold Case team has been out of action after being shot in the line of duty, Lauren Riley has been working Homicide. Her latest case involves an Icelandic man murdered on the streets of Buffalo mere feet from his hotel.

The brutality of the case hits Lauren hard. When she realizes the murder was committed on the night of a Full Cold Moon, it triggers memories of the first cold case she investigated that she's been unable to solve.

Lauren is determined not to fail again but when she is involved in a shooting with a suspect, she finds the case may be taken out of her hands . . . especially when it gains attention from the Icelandic government.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Mar 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781448303878

Lissa Marie Redmond

Lissa Marie Redmond is the author of the Cold Case Investigation series, and her short fiction can be found in Buffalo Noir, Down & Out, and other publications. A retired cold-case homicide detective, she has handled a number of high-profile cases and has appeared on television shows such as Dateline and Murder by Numbers. A proud wife and mother of two, she lives and writes in Buffalo, New York.

Book preview

ONE

‘I thought everyone in Iceland was blond.’

Buffalo Police Detective Lauren Riley raised her eyebrow at her temporary partner as she crouched over the body, but said nothing.

A young man with dark hair was lying face down in the alley that ran between the Sussex Hotel and the Fordham Center Bank. He’d almost made it to the light at the mouth of the alley, but had gone down less than a foot from where someone on the street might have seen him. Might have saved him. The attack had started halfway down the alley. His leather messenger bag lay intact on the ground thirty feet from the body. A black glove was next, fifteen feet away; its twin still on the victim’s hand, the leather marred as he had tried to defend himself. The victim’s knit hat had come off in the struggle – a vicious struggle – and was lying next to his outstretched arm. The dark stains on his knees and elbows showed Detective Riley he had desperately tried to crawl away, even as his attacker had been pounding his head in.

The sheer will of this man to survive had been as fierce and ferocious as his attacker’s intent to destroy him. The killer had overwhelmed him after pulling him back again and again, raining vicious blows to his head and face, finally wearing him down. The nails on his exposed hand were bloody and jagged. A knot clenched in Lauren’s gut as she realized this man had been literally inches from safety when he finally succumbed.

‘Did you find some ID?’ she asked, done with her initial notes. She flipped her notebook shut, tucking it in her front coat pocket, keeping it close. She’d need it again soon enough.

‘It says he’s Gunnar Jonsson from Reykjavik, Iceland.’ Sheehan was holding a bagged Icelandic passport, opened through the plastic, reading off the information to Lauren. ‘The customs stamp says he arrived in Toronto seven days ago. Crossed into the United States on the same date.’ Doug Sheehan was sixty-one years old and waiting for his birthday so he could collect Social Security and his pension at the same time. They’d been paired up only until Reese, her real partner, got back from his medical leave for an on-duty injury, but it was hard for someone like her to work with Doug. Clearly the mandated sensitivity training had been a waste of time. As far as Lauren was concerned, the sooner he blew out the candles on his cake the better.

Hell, she’d bake the cake herself. And blow out the candles.

Lauren brushed a strand of her short brown hair out of her eyes. The knit hat she’d worn against the December wind couldn’t even keep her shaggy bangs in line, let alone keep her ears warm. Her self-proclaimed stylist, also known as her neighbor, Dayla, had told her to try something new. So she had cut her long blond hair off and let it grow in naturally darker. I should have gone out for Thai food instead, she thought as she shoved another strand back under her hat. But at least now I don’t look so much like the pictures that ran in the paper.

‘We’ll have to check the Peace Bridge, Lewiston-Queenston and Rainbow Bridge records,’ she said, now snapping some quick photos with her work phone. Nothing beat the police photographer’s pictures, but in the beginning stages of an investigation she hated to wait.

The bridges were the three main crossover points between Toronto and Buffalo. Less than one hundred miles from each other, Toronto was the closest major international airport to Buffalo and its residents flew out of there quite often. While Buffalo Niagara was an international airport, it was only a mid-sized one and had very few direct flights out of the country. Lauren had taken many flights from Toronto that would have been a two-stop layover had she flown from Buffalo Niagara. She made a mental note to call her friend Brendan, who worked customs at the Peace Bridge. Maybe he could help get this man’s crossing records.

Sheehan had his other hand stuffed way down into his pants pocket, making his jacket ride up, exposing his beer gut. He brought the passport back up to his nose to take another look – he forgot his glasses in his desk back at the office. At least it wasn’t his gun this time. He had walked around a shooting scene two days before with an empty holster on his hip the entire time. When Lauren pointed it out, he got so red in the face she thought he was going to have a heart attack right there next to the crime scene tape.

‘Gunnar was hit from behind.’ Lauren pointed a gloved finger at the deep laceration that cut through the back of his head, tracing its path as it parted his jet-black hair in a wide bloody grin.

‘No signs of a robbery.’ Now Sheehan was crouched next to the body, still clutching the passport the evidence techs had taken out of the messenger bag. Sheehan motioned to the gold watch on the victim’s wrist. Gunnar’s wallet had been untouched as well, with three hundred in cash and an ATM receipt still tucked inside. The address on the ATM slip was just on the other side of the alley, and the time on it put his withdrawal within minutes of his murder. Hell, it was still within minutes of his murder. Not quite an hour had passed since Gunnar had taken the cash from the machine.

Lauren stood up, hands on her hips, stretching out her back. It sucked being over forty. Seemed like hitting that milestone meant overnight everything was either stiff or aching. Looking down at the young man’s body before her she immediately felt guilty. Aches and pains were definitely better than the alternative. She moved out of the way of the Buffalo Police photographer, Andy Knowles, as he adjusted his lens to get a long angle on the body from the mouth of the alley.

The victim was wearing jeans and a green sweater under his brown parka, which was soaked in blood. He’d been repeatedly struck in the head and face with a blunt object. Patrol officers had recovered a bloody brick two streets away and were now standing guard over it until evidence could come and collect it. Lauren could picture two young cops standing in the cold staring down at a blood-and-hair-encrusted brick that had probably been plucked from one of the numerous construction projects going on all over downtown. There seemed to be more scaffolding some days than skyline.

Lauren silently regarded the body before her. The skull looked crushed. The face practically erased. That was a lot of rage.

His clothes were intact. His heavy black boots were still laced and tied on his feet. This Icelandic man had been surprised and struck repeatedly, fought for his life, and left for dead. For nothing.

It didn’t make sense.

The wind was blowing sideways off Lake Erie. An hour earlier it had been a calm, clear bright night. The weather changed by the minute in Buffalo. The alley was perfectly sheltered from the snow blowing across the sidewalk just a few feet away. Lauren scanned the narrow passage. It was more of a walkway between the two multistory buildings than a typical city alley. There were no dumpsters, no garbage bags, no homeless stretched out over grates. During the day, business people would use it to cut through to the eateries and dry cleaners and office supply stores on the next street. At night, the only illumination was from windows high up on either side. She looked for cameras mounted above the few exit doors that opened into the alley but didn’t see any. She would double check with the building managers. Sometimes they got lucky.

The pavement was icy, and devoid of any usable shoe prints. Had a delivery driver not needed to take a piss in a hurry, Gunnar’s body could have laid there for hours unnoticed. After six in the evening on a Thursday in December this part of downtown Buffalo grew pretty desolate.

‘He has a key card to the Sussex Hotel,’ Lauren said to her partner. The new medical examiner and her assistant had arrived, and were waiting off to the side for her and Sheehan to give the OK to move the body. ‘We’ll stop at the front desk once the ME is finished.’

‘Are you done with the initial scene?’ Sheehan asked the photographer as he motioned toward the medical examiner and her assistant with the evidence bag. ‘I want them to turn the body over.’

The fifty-ish, curly-haired police photographer raised his monster of a camera, so unusual in this age of the cellphone picture, and snapped a couple quick photos. ‘All set, detective,’ he told Sheehan, backing up to make room and avoiding the large pool of blood outlining the upper body.

‘You’re good to go, doctor,’ Sheehan called, giving a thumbs up in case the howl of the wind outside the alley drowned out his words.

The ME walked over and gave Lauren a firm handshake, which was not all that easy to do with gloves on, then pulled latex gloves over the top of leather ones. Most people shed one for the other, but Doctor Heartly did things her own way. She was the third medical examiner Erie County had had in three years. The job, obviously, wasn’t that attractive. ‘How are you, Lauren?’

‘I’d be better if I had the bastard that did this in cuffs,’ she replied, eyes returning to the dead man’s body. Snow had started to accumulate on the back of his coat and in his hair. Older than Lauren’s daughters but younger than her, this man had been snuffed out and left in the alley like trash.

‘Detective Lauren Riley: avenging angel.’ That was as close to making a joke as Dr Heartly got.

Inwardly cringing at the nickname the media had bestowed upon her less than a year ago, Lauren told her, ‘That’s one part of my past I’d like to forget.’

‘I think I may have said that same thing once or twice.’ The medical examiner gave her a knowing half-smile, which Lauren managed to return. Lauren had been national news for a few months, hence the new hair. People knew her as a tall, long-haired blond, not a bespectacled, short-haired brunette.

But people see what they want to see, Lauren thought as she watched the doctor become all business. Heartly’s face settled into a neutral mask, ready for the task at hand.

Doctor Brenda Heartly drifted forward in that strange way she had of walking, a sort of glide combined with a limp. Headquarters speculation was that she was in a car accident when she was younger, but no one knew for sure, and no one knew her well enough to ask. She’d only been with Erie County for the last six months. Lauren felt bad for her on cold nights like this one because the limp definitely became more pronounced.

‘Help me, Kent,’ she told her assistant, and together they gently rolled Gunnar onto his side. Kent held the victim in place so that the medical examiner could do her thing. Heartly regarded the body for a moment, then pulled a digital recorder from her heavy wool coat’s pocket. She clicked it on and spoke into it. ‘Doctor Brenda Heartly, Erie County Medical Examiner. It is Thursday, December twelve; approximately’ – she glanced at the digital watch on her wrist – ‘8:03 p.m. The temperature is currently twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit.’

Lauren retrieved her notebook and scribbled the details so she could write up the scene later. The doctor continued with her examination. ‘Cursory on-scene impressions: the victim is a white male, approximately thirty years of age. Visual inspection notes numerous blunt force trauma wounds to the head and face. Livor mortis is not yet apparent in the extremities.’ She leaned forward over Gunnar as Kent steadied the body, trying to take in as much as possible before they took him back to the morgue. ‘Note that there is at least one wound to the victim’s skull where bone is exposed.’ She stood up and waved the ambulance crew in, as the photographer snapped a few pictures with the victim’s face visible.

‘Are you all set?’ Lauren asked the medical examiner.

She nodded. ‘I won’t be able to determine anything else until I can get him undressed and on the table. I’ll see you first thing in the morning at the post, Detectives.’

‘You’ll see one of us,’ Lauren told her. She hoped Sheehan would volunteer for the post. The post-mortems, or autopsies for the lay person, were always done at six in the morning. Lauren knew Sheehan was trying to build up his pension with overtime and he’d sacrifice a good night’s sleep for the extra money. The medical examiners worked on a straight salary, but Lauren doubted Dr Heartly ever got more than two or three hours of sleep a night. It seemed she always answered her cell on the first ring, no matter what time it was.

‘One detective is all I need,’ Dr Heartly responded and moved out of the way.

Kent helped the two ambulance attendants place the body on a stretcher. He looks so small, Lauren thought as they loaded the victim up. So small and broken.

Lauren hovered nearby as they prepared to wheel the body away. Gunnar, with his Viking name, came all the way here to Buffalo from Iceland to get run down in an alley and bludgeoned to death. Welcome to America.

‘You ready to go talk to the hotel manager?’ Sheehan’s nasally voice cut through Lauren’s thoughts.

‘Yeah.’ She watched as they trundled the body to the waiting ambulance at the end of the alley. The lights were off, the siren silent. There was no rush to get this poor man to the morgue – dead is dead.

Three patrol cars were parked on the street blocking the front of the alley. Behind them the ambulance attendants prepared to leave. Now that the city had gone to one-man cars, you got three patrol vehicles showing up to a scene instead of just one with two people in it. How that saved money Lauren wasn’t sure, but that was why she’d turned down supervisor jobs in the past. She didn’t want to be in charge of anyone but herself.

Thankfully, detectives still worked in pairs, but Lauren was known for going off on investigations on her own. It had gotten her in a lot of trouble and had almost cost both her and her partner, Reese, their lives this past year. She’d vowed to do better, try to work well with others, with mixed results so far.

The street cops nodded to the detectives as they ducked under the crime scene tape. A news van was illegally parked on the other side of Delaware Avenue facing south, its camera crew set up in front of it, angling to get the front of the Sussex Hotel, the ambulance and the police cars all in the same shot. Very cinematic, Lauren thought. Let’s make this crime scene Christmas card worthy.

‘Where are Anthony and Garcia?’ Sheehan asked. He looked a little disheveled, his thin gray hair mussed from the wind. He’d been relaxing in the men’s room for quite a while when Lauren had pounded on the outer door to alert him of the call out.

‘There was a shooting on Grape Street in the Fruit Belt. Doesn’t look like the guy’s going to make it,’ she told him. They paused to watch the ambulance pull away from the curb. ‘Lema and Avilla are over there too. That’s why we’re short-handed. They’ve got two crime scenes. We’re going to have to make do.’

‘We always got more cops than detectives,’ Sheehan said, trying to smooth his rumpled hair down. ‘Good for the overtime, bad for the follow-up.’

Lauren silently agreed with him wholeheartedly.

They ignored the news crew and hooked around the sidewalk to the valet parking area of the hotel. Four red-coated valets were standing on the curb watching the police cars with a knot of blue-suited managerial types. A short lady with a sharp steel-gray bob haircut broke off as Lauren and Sheehan approached the double door to enter the hotel.

‘I’m Theresa Hatten, the night manager. Can I help you?’

‘I’m Detective Riley, this is my partner Detective Sheehan. I think you might be able to,’ Lauren said, as Sheehan held the door open for both of them. ‘Is there some place we can go and speak to you in private?’

‘In my office,’ she said, eyebrows pulling together in a concerned V. ‘Follow me. We can talk in there.’

The manager led them through the brightly lit lobby. In the far corner a massive evergreen was decorated with red and gold bulbs. It was December twelfth and the holiday season was in full swing. Piped in Christmas music came at them from hidden speakers on all sides, adding to the festive mood. Everything looked perfect, except for the reflection of the blue-and-white police lights from the patrol cars bouncing off every surface.

While Lauren could pass for a disgruntled hotel guest, with her choppy brown hair and dark wool coat over black pants and winter boots, there was no mistaking Doug Sheehan for anything other than what he was. He oozed cop from every pore, another reason Lauren hated working with him. It was easier getting information from people if they didn’t feel like they were in a 1940s-style police interrogation. He even wore a stupid fedora when the weather was nicer. Every time he put that thing on the top of his head she wanted to slap it off.

The manager’s office was behind the front desk, a plain door discreet off to the side. Probably so the managers can monitor the front desk activity better, Lauren thought, as Hatten pulled out a swipe card and opened the door. The Sussex wasn’t the most exclusive hotel in Buffalo, but it was up there. It was one of those places that billed itself as a ‘boutique hotel’ and charged an extra hundred a night because they left a chocolate on your pillow. Lauren had never spent the night there. She was too cheap and single and she could fetch her own chocolates.

Crammed into Hatten’s tiny office was a desk and two chairs, a file cabinet and a printer. There wasn’t much room for anything else. It didn’t even have a window. She was neat, though. Color-coded folders sat stacked in perfect piles on her desk, unlike the papers on Lauren’s desk that looked like they’d been dumped there by a cyclone.

‘The valets are saying he was a guest here.’ Hatten maneuvered around the desk to her chair and took a seat. Now she was looking up at them with her round face and equally round glasses, hopeful that they would say no, he was not a guest of the hotel. ‘Do you have a name?’

Sheehan pulled his notebook out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open. ‘Gunnar Jonsson,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She snapped her fingers in recognition. ‘I remember one of our staff saying we had a guest from Iceland booked here for a week.’ She swiveled to the computer monitor on her desk and started pecking away at the keyboard. ‘Just give me a second to pull up the details.’

‘Is that unusual?’ Lauren asked as the manager scrolled through some documents on her screen.

‘Someone coming from Iceland to Buffalo in the winter months?’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t remember a single booking like that, and I’ve been with this hotel for two years. We don’t get a lot of business travelers. Our clientele usually favors short visits for some personal reason: a family function, a wedding, wanting to scratch Niagara Falls off their bucket list. Those sorts of things.’

Lauren nodded along. ‘He was here on business?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know for sure. Just an educated guess. It is between the two big holiday weeks – you know, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Those are big for family travel. Maybe one of our cleaning staff who was assigned to his room could help more with that.’ Hatten squinted at the screen. ‘There are charges on his bill from the business center, where he made some copies, and for room service. Here’s the reservation.’

‘Can we take a peek?’ Lauren asked.

Ms Hatten swiveled the monitor around so they could see it. ‘I can let you look at it, but company policy says we need a subpoena for his records and a search warrant for the room.’

‘You’ve done this before,’ Sheehan said, bending over to peer at the screen.

She nodded. ‘Unfortunately, yes. And I’ll have our corporate security make copies of the hall and front door camera footage for today. That’s stored offsite, but we can usually get it from the server within forty-eight hours. But we’ll need a subpoena for that as well.’

‘I’ll go get the search warrant typed up.’ Sheehan turned to Lauren and asked, ‘You want to sit on the room? Make sure no one goes in or out?’

Lauren scanned the reservation. He’d extended his stay just the day before from seven to twelve nights. Something was keeping him in Buffalo. ‘Sure. I’ll just grab a cup of coffee.’

‘I’ll have the kitchen staff bring you a pot,’ Hatten told her. ‘And a chair. His room was on the third floor, 317.’

‘You have done this before,’ Lauren remarked, marveling at her efficiency in the face of a brutal murder.

‘I worked for a major chain in Las Vegas for twelve years.’ She righted her computer and sighed. ‘I thought when I took this job in Buffalo it’d be a nice change of pace. But it seems like hotels are magnets for crime.’

‘Anywhere human beings congregate are magnets for crime,’ Lauren assured her. ‘Thank you for all your help.’

‘Don’t thank me. Unfortunately, I know the more I cooperate the sooner you’ll be gone and I can get back to convincing my guests everything is fine.’

Smart lady, Lauren thought.

TWO

Waiting outside a hotel room while her slow-as-molasses temporary partner typed up a search warrant was pure torture for Lauren. The manager had given her a spare key card and she was literally one swipe away from getting into Gunnar’s room. She kept fingering the smooth plastic rectangle in her coat pocket. A lot of cops would have just gone in, knowing the search warrant was coming. She couldn’t say that she wasn’t tempted, not because she was in a hurry, but because she hoped there might be something in that room that helped explain what happened to Gunnar in that alleyway.

Lauren looked at the round black bubble in the corner near the ceiling. The hotel camera watched her as she sat in the folding chair a maintenance man had provided. Even if she was tempted, she wouldn’t risk getting everything thrown out in court because she was in a hurry. I’ll say one thing about constant video surveillance, she thought, crossing her arms against her chest, it keeps you honest.

Lauren checked the time on her cellphone. She